Data centers support activities related to on-demand or online applications that require analyses of data. A data center typically includes computer hardware such as memory, hard drives, and networking hardware, and a cooling system. Data centers are designed considering various factors such as amount of data to be handled, expected network traffic, etc. When requests are received at the data center via a network, they are processed and results or outputs are transmitted to the requestor. The processing of the requests consumes computing resources at the data center and, in turn, affects the operation of the cooling system.
Data centers are typically not designed to manage peak usage at all times. A peak usage is a scenario where the computing hardware operates at maximum capacity. The cooling system may not handle peak usage for extended periods of time. The cooling system is typically designed for average consumption of computing resources that is below the peak usage. At peak usage, the data center may not be able to handle any more requests. Therefore, any new requests may be delayed or rejected. The capacity of data centers may be increased to handle more requests, but that leads to additional costs. Also, since peak usage scenarios may exist only for short durations, increasing the capacity of data centers is not an efficient and cost-effective option. But rejection of requests results in outage of services that are promised to customers. Random customers are affected by rejection of requests, leading to decrease in customer satisfaction, service level, or credibility of a service.
It would therefore be desirable to efficiently manage requests to deal with peak usage scenarios.